urbanDefect: the great unpositioned

The transportation swarm needs to know where all of its individual participants are.

I'm not talking about some great centralized scheme here. But in cities, in neighborhoods, the machines that are moving people and stuff around the roads want to know, with some urgency, where they are relative to all of the other machines participating in this crowded, fast-moving local relationship.

And it's sort of silly that so much of the great mobile mass remains positionally unaware, that so little has happened yet. Hence the defect. Because just about all the necessary technology is available now for cheap or free. Lots of interesting companies are converging into this meshy, swarmy, flocky future. Inrix. Dash. Zipcar. TeleAtlas - er - TomTom. Navteq - er - Nokia. Garmin. SiRF. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. Blah.

Before very long the machines will be positioning themselves without human interference, of course. Satellite and RF signals provide location. Cruise and Lane Control handle the easy driving. We need to help with intersections and special situations, but mostly we won't be so involved with the driving details any more. Because the cars know where they are, where they're going, how to get there.

Because this is how it looks when the machines start waking up, silly passenger.

urban defect: snowjam

It snowed hard in Boston yesterday - about 10 inches starting in the early afternoon - and it was fast falling and poorly predicted. By some unfortunate combination of bad timing and slack preparation a rush hour gridlock developed that crippled surface transportation throughout the city for six hours.


On roads all over eastern Massachusetts prisoner's dilemma scenarios played out with confounding consequences. As traffic thickened then stopped, cars waited through cycle after cycle of changing lights without forward movement. Frustration and impatience compelled some into the intersections. With the precedent set, many broke ranks, stopped ceding legal right of way, drove against one way traffic, piled into breakdown lanes and parking spaces. Exits and intersections clotted completely until the entire network seized. Cars continued to flow into the stagnating soup until the act of starting a trip - leaving parking lots, garages and side streets - became impossible.

Lessons?

• Beyond a certain level of congestion the rules of the road dissolve. It doesn't take much to push the urban population into acts of immediate self interest, actively thwarting the interests of others
• Civility evaporates, but not entirely. There wasn't a lot of shouting or blowing of horns. Police were nowhere to be seen, but a few people tried to jump into the breach and direct traffic. With the gridlock fully established though, this accomplished nothing
• The machine can't save us. Once laws are ignored and the social contract has been broken, the inanimate mechanics of traffic control are entirely worthless. It wasn't possible to untangle the knot until pressure began to diminish from the extremities.
  
• No leaders, no team. We have no social experience with or preparation for subordinating self interest (at least where transportation is concerned) to a greater whole. People are not trained to pull over and direct traffic. Motorists are not prepared to respect civilians who do.
  

The experience was not confidence inspiring. When competing individual urgencies get too numerous and intense the fragile nature of the Contract becomes frighteningly apparent. If the sudden need should arise for a mass evacuation of the city, none of us will be able to get out.